Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/58

40 only man who had actually caught him in the act of appropriation. He had made a habit of fixing in his mind the peculiarities of markings on his herd with that purpose in mind, but he had no actual proof. He could not prove that Hollister had slit the tongue of the calf and, though he had redeemed the animal, he had incurred Hollister's enmity. "For which," he assured himself, "he did not give a damn." Hollister friendly, or Hollister an enemy, would be equally a rascal. Current talk ran that Hollister had started cattle ranching with "a branding iron and his gall" and they had strangely multiplied.

Generally, Sheridan imagined, he confined his depredations to nightfall and the open range. This cutting of the wire might not have included the stealing of stock, but have been only a spiteful answer to his discomfiture over the red-and-white heifer. Some cattle have a fence-drifting habit and any of Sheridan's, coming to the break would surely have gone through and wandered down towards the river over unfenced territory.

He looked for tracks but could not find any. He and Stoney used wire-stretcher and staples and mended the break in silence. Stoney was never a man of words, a lack that had been bad for him under the recriminations of his mates for his spoiling of good food. Sheridan had his mouth half full of staples most of the time, and Hollister, and the ways to get rid of such undesirables, filled his mind.

All hands, save Rand and Jackson, were washing up at the trough they used for the purpose, half a